aesthetics

Beauty is how you feel inside, and it reflects in your eyes. It is not something physical.

There is a sort of aesthetic poverty about conservatism

All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.

The goal of all principled people is to recognize truth. Simple or complex thoughts and feelings standing alone rarely express any universal truths. Thoughts and feelings combine to create profound truths and compose extravagant falsities. Truth making exposes certain falsehoods, and lies shed light upon irrefutable truths. Art reveals the pageantry of nature along with the unmitigated grotesqueness that accompanies an earthly life. The search for truth begins with an intellectual journey into darkness whereas the search for beauty requires an imaginative act trussed with the classical beauty of Apollonian lightness. Aesthetic appreciation represents the perfect reconciliation of the sensual and rational parts of humankind__ animalistic nature. Similar to aesthetic experience _ contemplation of beauty without imposition of a worldly agenda _ love depends upon human sensory-emotional values, a judgement of values and sentiments.

He had never believed that spirituality had to be anemic or aesthetic.

[Hegel__] system of nature seemed, at least to natural philosophers, absolutely crazy_.Hegel_launched out with particular vehemence and acrimony against the natural philosophers, and especially against Isaac Newton. The philosophers accused the scientific men of narrowness; the scientific men retorted that the philosophers were insane.

What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.

Nothing's perfect, the world's not perfect. But it's there for us, trying the best it can; that's what makes it so damn beautiful.

By engaging with film illusions both actively and passively _ as I attempt to do in this book _ we strengthen the capacity of our minds to reason, imagine and think through ideas in a way unrestrained by some static conception of objective Truth. In so doing, the nihilistic gap existing between the real world and the whole variety of film worlds perhaps widens, but it also serves to offer a free, open space into which our interpretations may spill, mingle and propagate in uninhibited, nihilistic liberty.

We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are. ... There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty. I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake.

There is none more beautiful than the lover of beauty.

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,_ [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture_ the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of __he wild_ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. __eranging the senses_ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.__oday,_ he continued, __he bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.

At last everything was satisfactorily arranged, and I could not help admiring the setting: these mingled touches betrayed on a small scale the inspiration of a poet, the research of a scientist, the good taste of an artist, the gourmet__ fondness for good food, and the love of flowers, which concealed in their delicate shadows a hint of the love of women

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.

We are living in a moment where we have broken the equilibrium of the planet. We are not paying attention to our intuitive side. We only pay attention to our reason. We have become an urban animal

The future will look futuristic only because we will be trying to make it look futuristic.

Sylvia__ inherent appreciation for beauty as both artist and consumer is evident in her journals and letters_.she wrote beautifully about clothes. She wrote about them with irony and wit mixed in with all the rococo prettiness.

New clothes left Sylvia reeling with happiness. For Sylvia, a shopping list was a poem. She always shopped alone - it suited her deliberate nature and the artistic joy with which she approached all things aesthetic.